Lumotive, a lidar startup funded by Bill Gates, have announced an innovative beam-steering technology to significantly improve the performance, reliability, and cost of lidar systems for the self-driving car industry.
With their patented system using LCM (liquid crystal metasurfaces) and silicon fabrication, Lumotive introduced their beam-steering lidar that can simultaneously offer large optical aperture, wide field of view, and fast scanning.
Lumotive say this is a first lidar application of LCMs, semiconductor chips that steer laser pulses based on the light-bending principles of metamaterials. The technology has large apertures to improve lidar perception, while benefiting from the economics of semiconductor manufacturing to minimise system cost. Initial production units will be available for beta testing in the third quarter of this year.
Lumotive’s LCM chips contain no moving parts and are fabricated using mature semiconductor manufacturing along with liquid crystal display packaging to enable a commercially viable lidar system with low cost, high reliability and small size. In addition to cost and performance advantages, Lumotive LCMs can be put in small systems, appealing for other applications in industrial and consumer sectors which can benefit from lidar. The company’s initial target is the robo-taxi market.
Co-founder and Lumotive CEO Dr. William Colleran says his company’s new offering is “ideal for automakers and Tier-1s seeking safer, more cost-effective perception solutions for their vehicles; LCMs deliver the combination of performance and commercial viability that will finally eliminate barriers to adoption of lidar for both ADAS and autonomous vehicles”.
